Google Wave mashes communication, collaboration together

Google has previewed a new technology called Wave that combines collaboration …

Google is looking to change the way we use the Internet to communicate with a new service that it calls Google Wave. Wave was previewed Thursday during the Google I/O conference as a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos, feeds from around the Web, and more in a collaborative environment. The project is not only cool-sounding, it's also quite ambitious, and Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.

In a post to the Official Google Blog, Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen discussed the evolution of Wave after he and his brother Jens joined Google. According to Rasmussen, too much of our Internet communication was created out of imitation of a real-life form (e-mail, live chat, document sharing), and as a result, it had become too segmented when it didn't have to be. "What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?"

Cue Google Wave, which is "equal parts conversation and document." Invited parties can insert elements (photos, rich text, feeds, anything) or talk about different parts. Because it allows both collaboration and communication, Wave can be used for both quick messages or content that will be used over time. And, if you miss part of what happened with other collaborators on a wave, there's a playback feature so that you can see how something evolved.

Wave is not yet available to the public, though a set of APIsis available to developers—and developers seem to be pretty excited about them. On the newly created Google Wave Developer Blog, Google discusses how the APIs can be used to embed waves into your own site or write your own robots/gadgets that will work within a wave. Wave also makes use of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, allowing developers to create self-hosted instances of Wave that can communicate with each other over an open protocol without depending on Google's servers.

Some believe that Google's openness with its protocols and licensing indicate that the company has major ambitions for Wave to possibly replace e-mail and other traditional communications. Of course, that would depend on Wave gaining sufficient traction upon launch, and not everyone is sure that Google can pull it off on the level the company seems to think it can. For now, however, interested developers can request access to a Wave Sandbox so they can work on projects during the preview phase, and the rest of us can just sit and wait to hear more details when they become available.

28 Reader Comments

Perhaps the power in those older methods is the fact that they DO imitate real life. Might also be one of the reasons that the "desktop metaphor" gained so much traction, whatever your thoughts on where it's headed since then.

Originally posted by Wheels Of Confusion:Perhaps the power in those older methods is the fact that they DO imitate real life. Might also be one of the reasons that the "desktop metaphor" gained so much traction, whatever your thoughts on where it's headed since then.

But that's just an appeal to tradition. Just because we're used to doing things a certain way due to restrictions in a particular medium doesn't mean we're best served by artificially imposing those same restrictions in another medium.

Originally posted by wyldeone:But that's just an appeal to tradition. Just because we're used to doing things a certain way due to restrictions in a particular medium doesn't mean we're best served by artificially imposing those same restrictions in another medium.

Didn't say it was necessarily so, just that there might be something to the idea of manipulating things in a (remotely) physically-intuitive way as opposed to constructing a new interface. I'll just wait and see what comes of it.

quote:

Originally posted by Ostracus:I asked this elsewhere but how does Wave compare to say Croquet or it's successor?

The most obvious thing from the graphic appears to be that they ditched the "3D map" concept and instead have a window with documents, e-mail and social networking elements thrown together.

Wave isn't really asking you to interact with email and other communications in an unintuitive way. It is very much like very flexible email. Wave's power is not so much that its various features don't exist elsewhere but the way in which they're brought together and extensible. At a basic level, you get email, IM, and google docs all mashed together in a very collaborative way (allowing many people to make edits or comments to the same wave at a time). You interact with it in much the same way you would gmail.

The existing functionality is nice but the ability to embed a wave in another site with minimal code and add both server side (robots) and client side (gadgets) plugins allows developers to create very powerful tools. One of the cooler ones, "rosey" does real time language translation from some fifty odd languages. And, their fancy spell/grammar checker demo was pretty cool. They typed "Icland is an icland" which it corrected to "Iceland is an island" with each misspelling being corrected immediately after the word was finished. The openness and extensibility would appear to allow some really cool integration.

I still think the best thing that came out of google i/o was the free unlocked htc magic with an unlimited data and 1400 minute voice for 30 days sim card ... thanks google.

From the demo over on Google, I like what I saw. I can't say if the technology behind Wave is all that new until I get a gander at it. When watching the video the concept of email really doesn't apply honestly. At least the way one thinks about email doesn't apply. Google seems to be saying its time we are able to initiate a communication thinking only of the participants and the message and let the servers handle the rest. If you're live you get the communication realtime, if not you'll see what has transpired in your absence but in a manner that allows you to know how things unfolded. That the stream of communication can be segmented and participants allowed to comment on the portions most important to them at the actual places that the part of interest exist, well that goes way beyond threading.

For some reason I was thinking about bandwidth as they were typing but it hit me that the biggest save will be in hard drive space because as opposed to 20 versions of a document draft or even the multiple individual emails mailed back and forth each one a little larger, the wave original is the one being modified and only gets sent technically once. They just add the edits, time and position pointers I guess.

I like that they went with an open protocol because the strength of Twitter and other social technologies is that they don't require you to worry about what type of phone you have or computer. Better still, existing players like Facebook or Myspace can access the apis and enhance their services. Even if they choose not to go with Google Wave, there will be pressure to respond because what I saw is beyond compelling. College papers, kids remembering grand mom's recipe or workgroups collaborating on a presentation, Google Wave has legs for sure. The functionality I saw today is seriously impressive. The conversation that Google has started on the other hand is even better.

Originally posted by Preternatural:I like that they went with an open protocol because the strength of Twitter and other social technologies is that they don't require you to worry about what type of phone you have or computer. Better still, existing players like Facebook or Myspace can access the apis and enhance their services. Even if they choose not to go with Google Wave, there will be pressure to respond because what I saw is beyond compelling. College papers, kids remembering grand mom's recipe or workgroups collaborating on a presentation, Google Wave has legs for sure. The functionality I saw today is seriously impressive. The conversation that Google has started on the other hand is even better.

This is exactly how I feel about Wave. It completely changes the game for collaboration. I think about how it can be integrated into the workflow for the things I do every day, and the implications are stunning.

For example, as a journalist, I can imagine using Wave for seamless peer review and versioned editing and then using a custom Wave Bot to push the content directly into our Movable Type CMS. We'd be able to expose the underlying CMS features like scheduling etc directly through the Wave client and never have to touch the CMS directly ever again. The same mechanism could be used to automatically handle our article Twitter feeds and other mediums where we post article links.

The inherent extensibility of Wave makes it enormously conducive to streamlining every aspect of a workflow and pulling it into one highly interactive collaboration environment. I'm in love with the plugin system and I'm convinced that it's going to make it trivial to do that kind of programmatic integration with third-party services.

The fact that it's all federated is a killer feature. Anyone can modify and self-host the service and implement its capabilities in existing web services, so there are going to be absolutely no impediments to prevent this thing from becoming completely ubiquitous. Even if Google's implementation proves to be inadequate (the concurrency stuff is insanely ambitious and it's not clear yet how well it's going to work with more users) the ideas that Google has introduced with Wave are going to completely change the way that software developers think about building collaborative communication tools. I'm betting that we won't be collaborating with e-mail anymore a few years from now.

The Lotus Notes paradigm has been updated umpteen times over the years, granted with some key innovations, but I tire of hearing how each and every one is a completely new concept. Humbug.

Federation capabilities and *especially* low cost are the key factors here. Sounds like a winner, given its high visibility coming from Google.

Going out to buy earplugs now, as soon another consultant will show up with a lightly customized Wave packaged in a long and winding ribbon of discourse about innovation/tech support/real-time finance/live eHR portal/emergency services mgmt or whatever. And it'll all be new to the CEO, who won't really understand any of it (sec'y still dials his calls), so the rest of us will warm our chairs and dream of doing our jobs.

I use software like Adobe Connect for a distance learning program right now. The main uses are for students abroad who want to log on and participate in lectures. The faculty is in a studio and the students all connect and can share voice, slideshows, and other documents.

Why does it have to be a website? Seriously, am I the only one who likes to use a dedicated, native client for stuff like email or instant messaging as opposed to going to websites? Love the idea, hope there will be alternatives.

Originally posted by kaworu1986:Why does it have to be a website? Seriously, am I the only one who likes to use a dedicated, native client for stuff like email or instant messaging as opposed to going to websites? Love the idea, hope there will be alternatives.

Does your dedicated client work on any computer that has a web browser, or just on your OS?

Of course, it only works on the OS it was coded for, but it does so BETTER. Also, it allows the user/sysadmin a bit more control and can be much better integrated with the rest of the computing environment.

Originally posted by kaworu1986:Why does it have to be a website? Seriously, am I the only one who likes to use a dedicated, native client for stuff like email or instant messaging as opposed to going to websites? Love the idea, hope there will be alternatives.

Does your dedicated client work on any computer that has a web browser, or just on your OS?

I will unhappily point out that google has shown that just because it's browser based does not make it multiplatform. Google talk (video) does not function in Linux yet.

I think you'll agree that we're seeing an increasing trend of just making plugins for browsers rather than native clients. In general I much prefer a well designed UI that is not limited by the normal browser window as well as offline capabilities (I'm still not convinced that gears works well).

Originally posted by kaworu1986:Why does it have to be a website? Seriously, am I the only one who likes to use a dedicated, native client for stuff like email or instant messaging as opposed to going to websites? Love the idea, hope there will be alternatives.

Does your dedicated client work on any computer that has a web browser, or just on your OS?

I will unhappily point out that google has shown that just because it's browser based does not make it multiplatform. Google talk (video) does not function in Linux yet.

I think you'll agree that we're seeing an increasing trend of just making plugins for browsers rather than native clients. In general I much prefer a well designed UI that is not limited by the normal browser window as well as offline capabilities (I'm still not convinced that gears works well).

Didn't you see them using a CLI ui in the demo? Developers can make whatever kind of front end to the clients that they want. Just like pine, mutt, gmail, and thunderbird are all frontends for a common protocol SMTP,IMAP,POP,etc, so will there be many different clients for the WAVE protocol. At least that's what I can glean

Good discussion, but watch the video Especially since you are unhappy about the Linux support for other Google services; I would think you would have wet your pants when they showed the CLI client.

Originally posted by kaworu1986:Of course, it only works on the OS it was coded for, but it does so BETTER. Also, it allows the user/sysadmin a bit more control and can be much better integrated with the rest of the computing environment.

I'm sure someone will write a java client in no time flat that is cross platform and has support for the windows ui, gtk+ ui, and whatever the mac ui set is. Or, *you* could write it

Originally posted by Chrelad:Didn't you see them using a CLI ui in the demo? Developers can make whatever kind of front end to the clients that they want. Just like pine, mutt, gmail, and thunderbird are all frontends for a common protocol SMTP,IMAP,POP,etc, so will there be many different clients for the WAVE protocol. At least that's what I can glean

Good discussion, but watch the video Especially since you are unhappy about the Linux support for other Google services; I would think you would have wet your pants when they showed the CLI client.

Chrelad

Nice. If they indeed want this to be "email next" then they need that kind of openness.

Originally posted by segphault:.....The inherent extensibility of Wave makes it enormously conducive to streamlining every aspect of a workflow and pulling it into one highly interactive collaboration environment. I'm in love with the plugin system and I'm convinced that it's going to make it trivial to do that kind of programmatic integration with third-party services....

Perhaps overly optimistic, I am hoping that Wave will streamline the Social Media landscape. If I hadn't gotten 1Password in a Macheist, I'd be batty right now. I get that Twitter is supper easy and simple. Stated another way, we'd just say it has no features. It needs an army of other websites to provide functionality that Rejaw (walking dead for two more days but had real realtime), Jaiku (Angelified) and Pownce (just dead apparently) had.

As a consultant and designer, I have tried every solution introduced that might allow me to interact from a distance with my clients. The problem always ends up being that my client has to learn how to interact with the technology to make it useful for us both. Did I mention the crazy number of signups needed. Ultimately, I end up meeting face to face because I can't afford for a client to become frustrated trying to navigate something that affords me more convenience than them. With family, friends and church members, I try out different mixes and there are some good ones out, but only recently have we really gotten to dead simple like Drop.IO (no desktop sharing). I have similar clients and really want/need something that allows me to address them in mass, but also tutor each other. Twitter has all the parts, but I am not about to begin a tutorial on hash tags and groups to people who haven't updated their OS since they bought their computer or/can't update their subscription to their virus software without help.

The thinking behind much of today's presence tech is often sound, but ends up being built by geeks for geeks. The designers and engineers of these tools have to keep in mind they are designing for two audiences often. Collab services are the purview of teens, a singular audience and professionals who just happen to have a sub audience who often need stuff to be obvious and easy. Google Wave really says, hide the complexity and put the features out in the freaking open. Social network agnostic and signup agnostic, that's a win for me.

Hmm, that real time typing thing reminds me of ICQ. It to could display text as it was typed, but no IM system since have made use of such a mode (that i know of). And i think not even ICQ has it as default these days...

Originally posted by kaworu1986:Why does it have to be a website? Seriously, am I the only one who likes to use a dedicated, native client for stuff like email or instant messaging as opposed to going to websites? Love the idea, hope there will be alternatives.

Originally posted by Wheels Of Confusion:Perhaps the power in those older methods is the fact that they DO imitate real life.

Whose real life are you talking about? I never had a desk with folders until I was 25 and had been using Mac OS, Windows, GNOME, KDE, and other folder metaphor operating system environments for more than half of my life.

Originally posted by Wheels Of Confusion:Perhaps the power in those older methods is the fact that they DO imitate real life.

Whose real life are you talking about? I never had a desk with folders until I was 25 and had been using Mac OS, Windows, GNOME, KDE, and other folder metaphor operating system environments for more than half of my life.

Originally posted by Wheels Of Confusion:Perhaps the power in those older methods is the fact that they DO imitate real life. Might also be one of the reasons that the "desktop metaphor" gained so much traction, whatever your thoughts on where it's headed since then.

After watching the video, it seems to me that that the power of Wave is that it can stand as a metaphor for multiple things in real life (unlike the desktop model, or others). I think that it might take a while to get used to viewing one app in different ways, but in the end it will be nice to have all these mediums consolidated.I think it could really catch on if it is somehow integrated with gmail.